Turning it off would have solved the bureaucratic problem for flight crew. Sadly, the passengers (collectively) failed to accomplish this basic task.

> Turning it off would have solved the bureaucratic problem

The article says two Bluetooth radios weren’t turned off. Do we know if one of those was “the bomb?”

You can't really turn off most BLE devices with internal batteries, off means low power mode nowadays. Some of them are still discoverable on wireshark when they are 'off'.

It could've been in checked luggage and turned itself on from the movement. No way for the passengers to get to it. Unfortunately it didn't turn itself off (although if it did, and then later turned on again, that would've been even worse.)

The passenger may not have even known, I've certainly renamed friends' phones as a goof, although not to something that would get them in to trouble.

I don't think it's as silly as people are making out. It at least proves a passenger is in control of the device, rather than it being stashed / hidden in the cabin. A device in the cabin not owned by any passenger broadcasting a signal is definitively more suspicious than one with a passenger in control. We don't know what their next step would have been - they might have asked everyone from row X to Y to turn their bluetooth back on to narrow down the search etc. They probably didn't expect that anybody would fail to respond to the first instruction.